


why the moment looked the way she did

by andorgyny



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-21
Updated: 2014-04-21
Packaged: 2018-01-20 08:02:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1502906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andorgyny/pseuds/andorgyny





	why the moment looked the way she did

Rose wraps her arms around herself. The snow stopped falling hours ago, but she’s still cold and tired.

They’d taken her away from the Doctor. Those men, on their horses, had come and knocked her out and stolen her. What they’d done with him, she doesn’t know. She barely knows where she’s going.

The chill wraps around her body like a blanket, and she stops walking. Her borrowed clothes are in tatters thanks to an encounter with a wild dog; her hair is mussed and in desperate need of a brush. She listens to the sound of the wind, feels it press against her back and run through her curls. The identification tag in her hair swings with her every movement.

It had been a labor camp. The stench of exhausted bodies toiling away in the factories had been so powerful that she still smells it in her clothes, in her skin. From what she’d learned, the humans who had colonized this planet had used up its natural resources and enslaved its indigenous people, putting them to work in various labor camps.

When she blinks, she sees the faces of brave Ninda, the dark-skinned woman who had been arrested for anti-government political speech, of rebellious Karnic, a young boy who had been born in the prison, of the kind-hearted Glesia, his mother. She shuts her eyes against tears.

“Rose,” he says hesitantly. “Are you okay?”

She sighs. He’d found her on the sixteenth day. Sixteen days of escape plans and bartering food for information and beatings, of handsy guards and prison fights and feeling so frightened she barely spoke to anyone.

“I will be,” she says.

He takes her hand as they walk away from the burning remains of the camp and back to the TARDIS. Back home.


End file.
